Training offer

In 2019, private organisations represented 78% of the training providers operating in the Luxembourg market. Institutional and sectoral bodies accounted for 8% of the total, and not-for-profit associations for the remaining 14%.

A closer look at the private training providers

On average, private training providers have eight to nine years' experience in their field. They are mainly very small entities: seven in ten have fewer than five employees.

For slightly more than half of them, training is their sole or principal activity, carried out exclusively within the Grand Duchy; they have at least one training room. In a third of the providers, more than half the employees are trainers; half of them habitually call in external trainers.

Three in five private training providers consider the Internet, which includes the social media, a useful tool for increasing the visibility of their offer, as well as a means of reaching new clients.

Quality in the training providers' offer

Generally, training providers (whether they are private, institutional or sectoral, or not-for-profit) are well able to document the information describing the training they offer and their procedures in terms of resource management as well as monitoring and assessing learners, and this demonstrates their commitment to quality. Their main difficulties lie in presenting information on the methods used to assess courses, reviewing and assessing the skills and performance of trainers, co- and sub-contractors, and assessing whether learners have achieved the training aims.

Only two in five training providers consider the certification of trainers to be decisive, although more than half state that they have a norm, certification, label and/or charter for the management of their organisation, their trainers or their courses.

How the training providers operate

Nine in ten training providers devise custom-made training programmes. A third offer courses in a single domain; compared with a quarter in four or more domains.

The domains with the most training courses remain "Personal and Professional Development", "Business Management and Human Resources" and "Languages". Demand in this last domain focuses mainly on learning French, Luxembourgish and English.

E-learning is becoming more widely used. Two thirds of training providers offer e-learning courses, mainly with distance tutoring.

Not surprisingly, the training providers train mainly upper and middle managers and employees in the private sector, above all in finance and industry. There is also a substantial number of individuals funding their own training. Slightly more than one in two training providers offer such courses.

The digitalisation of training

Training is gradually becoming more digitalised, with the increasing use of digital tools such as virtual classrooms and video conferencing.

One in two training providers sees digitalisation as a way of encouraging learners' commitment and increasing their own responsiveness to the latter's demand. They fear, however, that it tends to dehumanise the learning experience.

Review and prospects

In 2019, six in ten training providers generated annual turnover of less than 50.000 euros from carrying out this activity in the Grand Duchy.

Future prospects for turnover were reviewed downwards in the short and medium term after the first lockdown (March to June 2020), although confidence in the future has tended to remain stable. 43% of the managers of training providers are still hoping to increase their turnover in the medium term, 7 points down from before the first lockdown, but still more than the number who are betting on a drop (15%) or uncertainty (13%). 72% felt it will take one or two years to return to the same level of activity as before the lockdown.